Thermal Energy Storage Materials:

Thermal energy storage (TES) materials are intended to rapidly absorb and release heat to balance thermal transients. This improves device or component reliability, reduces the scale of other thermal components necessary to reject heat at peak heat generation rates, and can allow for useful capture and reutilization of low-quality heat, improving overall system efficiencies. The key challenges in this area are demonstrating high energy storage density and high cooling power densities in stable, reversible systems. We have demonstrated a number of important achievements in this area:

High cooling-power thermal composites from incompatible materials (graphitic foam, salt hydrate) through use of surfactants.

Material-specific nucleation catalysts identified through integrated computational database screening approaches. This approach led to rapid identification of a newly discovered (more stable, more effective) nucleation catalyst for the LiNO3-3H2O system with minimum experimental effort.

Derive “cooling power figure of merit” (FOM_q) from analytical solutions to Stefan’s problem. Allows for intelligent materials design and side-by-side comparizon of different materials with different thermophysical properties